ZOTAC's GeForce GTX 480 AMP! Edition comes with a mighty Zalman VF3000 cooler strapped to it which reduces the card's temperatures by 20°C. Thanks to the new cooling solution, the card has no problems running at higher clock speeds out of the box. But is that enough to declare this triple slot card a winner?

I'm not surprised about the power consumption; it's been compared to the power consumption of the "launch card" not the mass production card. My GTX 480 consumes just 50w more at load that my old GTX 285. By the way most GTX 480 owners seem to reach 830-840 on the core with stock voltage; otherwise another excellent review.

The fans have 4 wires and they should be capable of being dynamically controlled .
Maybe there is something wrong with the sample TPU received. I've just read another ZOTAC GTX480 test and it shows big variations in idle/load dbA, so the fans must be controlled.